Tuesday, April 12, 2005

OnDemandTV, a joint venture of NTT West and Itochu, has selected SkyStream's Mediaplex-20 video headend to support a nationwide rollout of IP-based broadcast television in Japan. Financial terms were not disclosed.

OnDemandTV will provide 23 broadcast channels as well as an extensive library of video on demand (VoD) movies using NTT East and NTT West's networks. The service is currently available to NTT West subscribers in the Osaka metropolitan area. Initially, the service is being broadcast over NTT West's fiber network using MPEG-2 compression. OnDemandTV plans to expand the service on a national scale to the remainder of NTT West and all of NTT East subscribers in the near future, delivering content over ADSL as well as over fiber.

Skystream said its headend can distribute hundreds of high-quality video channels for large-scale video delivery in multiple formats and rates to millions of subscribers at the same time. The Mediaplex-20 system is a complete video headend in a single chassis that offers 48 MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC encoders. It also provides video multiplexing and demultiplexing, routing, video rate-shaping, stream replication, and ATM to IP conversion. The Mediaplex-20 video headend has over 100 field-proven deployments in 18 months.

For smaller deployments or in space-constrained environments, SkyStream also offers the iPlex ultra-compact video headend in a 1 RU form factor that provides the same integrated video headend capabilities of the Mediaplex-20 headend. It supports up to 8 MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC encoders.

This article examines what telephone companies should look for when shopping for a video headend, one of the most important components in the delivery of "Telco TV."

http://www.skystream.com

In September 2004, SkyStream Networks and Alcatel announced plans to collaborate on IPTV. SkyStream also announced that it has signed a reseller agreement with Alcatel, in which Alcatel will be offering SkyStream Networks' Mediaplex-20 video headend platform as part of its IPTV Open Media Suite of solutions to telecom operators worldwide.